To find a voice memo, a meeting recording or a video by something somebody said in it, install Findra's speech capability. It transcribes your audio and video on your own machine, offline, and searches each transcript exactly the way it searches a document - so typing a phrase you remember hearing finds the recording, and the result shows the line and where in the recording it was said.
findra --models install speech
findra --content on
The same choice is on Findra's first screen and under Content in its settings.
What it costs
A 547 MB speech model, plus the 1.04 GB document models if you do not have them already, because a transcript is searched the way a document is. Everything runs on your own processor or graphics card: no recording is uploaded, there is no account and there is no cloud transcription service.
Transcribing takes real time, and it happens only while Findra is open. With a graphics card it goes faster; without one it runs on the processor, which is slower but supported.
How long a recording is worth transcribing
One number decides it, for sound files and videos alike: five minutes by default. A recording longer than the limit is passed over and says so, and raising the limit later goes back for exactly the recordings it passed over and nothing else. The choices are Off, 5 min, 30 min, 2 hr and No limit, in Settings or from a terminal:
findra --content limit 30
What it listens to
- Sound files: MP3, M4A, AAC, WAV, FLAC, OGG, Opus, WMA and AIFF
- The sound track of videos: MP4, MOV, MKV, AVI, WebM, M4V, WMV, MTS and M2TS
Hebrew
Findra can take a second pass for Hebrew. The general model listens first and decides the language, and only the recordings it calls Hebrew are transcribed again with a model trained for Hebrew. It is a 1.51 GB download and needs the speech capability:
findra --models install hebrew
When a recording is not found
Ask Findra about that one file. It says why in plain words - longer than the limit, still queued, failed, or read - and changes nothing:
findra --searchindex "why:C:\Users\you\Music\Voice 014.m4a"
Try it
Findra is free and open source, for Windows 10 and 11:
winget install blakazulu.Findra
The installer is also on the releases page, https://github.com/blakazulu/findra/releases/latest, for x64 and arm64.